Our latest addition to the LTE Asia 2015 programme, keynote speaker Arvinder Gujral, Director for Business Development, APAC at Twitter will be joining us in Singapore next month to examine OTT/operator partnerships and how they are developing in Asia. I spoke to him ahead of his talk to get an insight into this evolving relationship;

“The biggest fundamental shift that has happened is that mobile operators have learned to evolve to the reality of Internet and Data superseding Voice and SMS, and have successfully adapted that to their business models and unit economics” he said “OTT providers on the other hand have also learned to work with the mobile operators, and at the same time added value to the operator’s core KPIs around Data and its new operating models. The apparent threat perception that was lingering for a while has been replaced with “lets-add-value” attitude to each other’s business, because at the end of the day it’s the end-user who needs to see benefit from both players, and not one over another.”

“The apparent threat perception… has been replaced with “lets-add-value” attitude”

“Twitter has always worked well with mobile operators; we have long-term relationships with over 500 operators globally. Over time our engagements have evolved from simple SMS connections and Twitter utilising an operator network, and more recently, with operators using the Twitter social graph and network to achieve their KPIs.

We tied up with 17 mobile operators globally for the FIFA World Cup last year, and five operators in South Asia alone for the this year’s Cricket World Cup. The aim was to take the best of Twitter for these events and make it available to the operators’ subscribers. The partnership worked beautifully as operators used their distribution and marketing effectively to show value of Data/Internet via a custom Twitter experience for these global sporting events. Of course, these successes are enabling us to evaluate bolder models to work with in the future.

Our recent partnership with Indosat (the first ever in APAC), where users of Indosat can now buy Voice, SMS, Data directly from Twitter, is another great example of how we are helping our operator partners add to their bottom line”.

But in this fast paced industry, where nothing ever stays the same – how will these partnerships evolve?

“As mobile operators look towards becoming digital operators in their own right, Twitter is in a great position to be ideal partners. We have announced Twitter Fabric, our suite of SDKs, that helps developers along the journey from idea to revenue. We have also started to work with mobile operators in their journey to explore this world of Mobile Apps and are sharing our insights, infrastructure and social graph to help them scale and eventually build additional revenue streams, all via our SDKs”.

“I believe LTE Asia will be a great hub where Twitter gets to learn from the mobile operators on what their concerns are and what they are doing about it. In that process, I can share my experience (in my previous career with a mobile operator) and partner with them through Twitter in their journey towards growing the digital mobile operator industry”.

Arvinder will be discussing Twitter’s operator partnerships during the LTE Asia Keynotes on the 7th of October. If you haven’t registered to attend the show yet or applied for a free operator pass, you can do so now buy visiting our website – www.lteconference.com/asia